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South Carolina teabagger governor Nikki Haley has decided to remedy South Carolina’s myriad ways of sucking for people who live in South Carolina — it currently has the country’s fourth-highest unemployment rate and sports saturated Medicaid rolls (meaning everyone is poor) — like a champion middle manager with a mean collection of self-help books who thinks everybody’s problem is all the negative thoughts filling their auras. So from here on out, all state employees under her control are ordered to say, “It’s a great day in South Carolina” when they answer their work phones (see photo), despite this being the exact sort of phrase that immediately reminds everyone it is not.

From The State:

Haley said the change will boost the morale of state workers, remind them they work for the callers on the other end of the line and help her sell the state to employers

“It’s part of who I am,” Haley said. “As hokey as some people may think it is, I’m selling South Carolina as this great, new, positive state that everybody needs to look at.”

Among the state agencies that are part of Haley’s Cabinet is the state’s prison system. Others include commerce, education, public safety and health.

Haley has been advancing a plan to force jobless South Carolinians to pass a drug test before they can receive unemployment insurance, claiming an epidemic of substance abuse. The problem was so unbelievable, Haley said last month, that at the Savannah River nuclear site, “[of] everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test.”

So unbelievable, in fact, that a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the site, told the Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney “he had no idea what Haley was talking about.”

The site doesn’t even test applicants, just people who have already been accepted, and the rate of those who fail drug tests is LESS than 1 PERCENT.

At first, Haley’s office doubled down on the claim, blaming others for faulty numbers, but in an interview with the AP today, Haley said she’ll be more careful before blindly repeating things people tell her without checking them:

“I’ve never felt like I had to back up what people tell me. You assume that you’re given good information,” Haley said.

“And now I’m learning through you guys that I have to be careful before I say something.” (yeah, you think?)

Haley said she’d probably repeated “a million times” the story that about the test failures.

A Tea Party rally that was supposed to include an appearance by Donald Trump drew only 30 people in Columbia, South Carolina.

Even though the rally still included Gov. Nikki Haley according to The State only 30 people showed up.

Trump’s decision to not enter the GOP presidential race left local Tea Party leaders stewing about the way they had been treated. But about 30 people were on hand Thursday to thank Gov. Nikki Haley, lawmakers and activists for their work to require more on-the-record Legislative votes.